Gravity (27 page)

He was in the midst of working his considerable charms to seduce his current prey when none other than Amity Ledger strolled by the open door.  She paused to look in, rolling her eyes when she saw Hal.  She was just about to move on when she saw me in the corner.  Her pink-painted lips twisted into a snarl as she turned to face me, crossing her arms over her chest and assuming her usual attitude-laden stance.

“Well, well, well.  If it isn’t Trace’s little lap dog,” she sneered, sauntering a few feet into the room and stopping.  “I would never have guessed you’d have dreams like this.  So you’re a perv
and
a freak.  Who knew?”

“Obviously, if I had any control over my dreams, you wouldn’t be here,” I snapped back, surprising myself with my boldness.  In real life, I doubted I’d ever talk to Amity that way.

“Yeah, right.  You probably have dreams like this all the time.  You seem creepy like that.  I just can’t figure out why
I’m
here.”

Amity looked around in disgust, her top lip curling as if she were afraid to breathe the air in the dream for fear of corrupting her perfect lungs.

“What do you mean?”

Amity cast me a dubious look.  “Are you deaf?  Or is English your second language?”

“Neither.  And I didn’t stutter.  Maybe you’re just too blonde to understand simple questions like
what..do…you…mean
.”

“As if!” she replied with another roll of her eyes.

“Then answer my question.  What did you mean by that?”

Amity paused, obviously debating what and how much to tell me.  When she finally spoke, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. “I’m a dream walker.”

“A what?”

“A dream walker,” she said, more slowly as if that would help me to understand.

As I thought about what she was saying, I wondered why I didn’t already know that, why the whispers hadn’t come to tell me about her. 

But then, as if on cue, they did. 

They told me about how she could slip inside anyone else’s mind and slide through their dreams—seeing their most intimate memories, accessing their most hidden secrets and reliving their most fearsome nightmares.  Why anyone would want to do that was beyond me, but, perversely, it sounded just like something Amity would get a kick out of. 

I couldn’t help but wonder how long she’d been doing it and if it had lent a hand in making her the nasty person she was.  She was seeing terrible things and becoming privy to a lot of powerful information.  Who wouldn’t be corrupted by that?

“So you know about all the creatures in Two Lakes, huh?”

Amity narrowed her eyes on me, but never answered.  Instead, she walked further into the room and began opening doors.  With each door she opened, more doors appeared along the length of the aged wallpapered walls.  And with each door she peeked into, I felt a nudging sensation in the back of my mind, as if she were rummaging through my head rather than through the room we were in. 

I soon found out that’s exactly what she was doing.

“So you’re an oracle.  And you’ve got the hots for Trace worse than I thought,” she said when she finally turned back to me.  “Good luck with that.  He’s a bigger freak than you are.”

The first emotion that rushed to the surface was anger, but before I let it have some amount of control and I whipped the daylights out of Amity, I pushed it down and made a move to explore what she knew about Trace.

I cleared my throat.  “Why do you say that?”

“His head is all screwed up.  I mean, he’s got a face that’s to die for, but he’s got some major family problems.”

“Like what?”

Amity took a step closer and leaned in.  It was as though, for a moment, she was able to forget that I was socially unacceptable in her eyes and treat me like a friend to whom she was could dish juicy gossip.

“Well, apparently his father killed his mother and he saw the whole thing, so they keep putting spells on him to change his memories.  This last one was a doozy!”

“What last one?  I thought all the magic had been removed?”

“Are you kidding me?  This one was one of the worst spells yet.”

“So, if Rebekah isn’t Trace’s mother, who is she?”

Amity shrugged, quickly losing interest in the subject.  “I don’t know.  I’m limited in what I can see.  I’m not an oracle you know.  That’s something you should be able to find out.”

I wanted to ask her how, but I knew she didn’t know and I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of appearing to need her help.

Just then, Amity cocked her head to the side and smiled.  “Time to go,” she announced out of the blue, turning to meander casually away.  All the scene lacked for a classic theatrical exit was the echo of her whistle as she faded down the hall.

Within seconds, I realized what had triggered her departure.  It was my alarm clock.

********

Nearly an hour later, as I finished getting ready for school, I pondered the best way to approach Trace.  The topic was so sensitive and so potentially volatile that it made me dread talking to him even more, which was saying a lot, and his strict avoidance of me only exacerbated it.  I mean, far be it for me to
force myself
on him.  Just the thought of him perceiving it that way made me physically ill.  If I was prone to breaking out in hives over stress, I’d have been covered in red welts. 

With a sigh, I reminded myself that it was important that I tell him what I’d found out.  For that reason, I had no choice but to suck it up. 

As I dragged the brush through my hair, a sense of foreboding assailed me.  It was poignant enough that I staggered back a bit and had to grab the bathroom sink for support, my head spinning with worry of an unknown etiology.  When I finally straightened and moved to finish my hair, my palm was wet where it gripped my brush.  Something was going on.  I had no idea what it was, but I knew instinctively that it wasn’t good.

When I came out of the bathroom, distracted by what might be looming ahead in the day, I nearly ran Lacey over.  She was emerging from Brady’s room.

“When did you get here?” I asked.

“Um…” Lacey stammered tellingly.

“You’ve been here all night and you didn’t even tell me?”  I couldn’t keep the irritation from my voice.  It seemed that everyone in my life was changing into someone I barely knew, barely recognized.

“Um, yeah.”

“Why?”

Lacey fidgeted uncomfortably.  “I didn’t want you to feel worse about the situation with Trace.  I feel guilty for being happy.”

Her words drained the anger from me as effectively as pulling the plug would drain the water from a bathtub.  Without hesitation, I wrapped one arm around Lacey’s neck and pulled her in for a hug.  I wasn’t sure who needed it more—her or me—but for those few seconds, one relationship in my life seemed to be almost back to normal.  And it felt wonderful.

“Please don’t feel guilty.  I
want
you to be happy.  I’m
happy
that you’re happy.  Brady, too.”  To give more punch to my words, I smiled as brightly as I could.  It must’ve worked because Lacey’s tense expression melted into one of blatant relief.

“I’m so glad.   I hate keeping things from you.  It’s been making me feel like I’m choosing your brother over you.  Like eggs benedict.  And that’s not the case.”

I chuckled, tactfully ignoring her mauled reference to the traitor, Benedict Arnold. 

“You don’t have to keep anything from me, Lace.  Seriously,” I said, leaning back to look into her face.  “I’ll be fine.”

She smiled at me.  “Of course you will.  You’re the strongest person I know.”

I returned her smile, but her words affected me much more than the casual gesture implied.  I felt anything but strong lately and it meant more to me than I ever thought it could that Lacey thought I was strong.  I
wanted
to be strong.  I
needed
to be strong.  I just wasn’t sure I was capable of being
that
strong.  But it helped to think that Lacey saw something in me that made her think I was.  It helped a lot.

On the way to school, stuffed in the back seat of Brady’s Jeep, I pondered how something so small as an off-hand comment like Lacey’s could turn my whole day, my whole attitude around.  Because it had.  I felt much more prepared to talk to Trace, to handle whatever came my way in the coming days, weeks and months, even if that happened to be death, which I still refused to think about at length.  In fact, I rode the high of her words all way to school and all the way down the hall to my locker, right up until the point where the world turned upside down.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The instant I reached my locker, a crowd of people seemed to materialize out of nowhere and descend upon me.  It was as if they’d been lying in wait for me to arrive at school.  And maybe they had.

I was bombarded with questions, questions that might puzzle someone who didn’t know what was going on.  But I did.  I knew to what they were referring.  I just didn’t know how they’d found out.

“What am I?”

“Do I have special powers?”

“What can I do?”

“Why is this happening?”

“Can I hurt people?”

“Is there something about this town?”

“Is everyone in Two Lakes a freak?”

“Will this ever go away?”

“How do we control it?”

“Is it contagious?”

My head spun with their questions.  My body hummed with their upset, their anxiety obviously nearly enough to trigger the rise of their second nature.  I said a silent prayer that they wouldn’t start to change.  Being trapped among them during their transformation would likely kill me on the spot.  And I’d have no recourse, no choice in the matter, no protection from them.

Trace’s image drifted through my mind, like a slow-moving train that refused to stop.  And I let it go.  There was no reason to cry over that spilled milk.  His feelings for me were gone.  I had to deal with it.  And the way he was acting now was deplorable and I’d be doing myself a favor to just get good and mad rather than let it upset me.

Only it did upset me.  A lot.

I felt the loss of him and of what we had like someone had stripped the skin from my body, exposing every nerve to the harshness of the air around me.  I hurt.  Deeply.

As if summoned by my inner musings, a head taller than all those that surrounded me caught my eye.  I looked up and met Trace’s eyes.  For a brief moment, it registered how bedraggled he looked.  His golden eyes were lackluster and ringed with dark circles that made him look far older than his years.  His skin was pasty-pale and his mouth looked pinched.  As he walked away, I noticed that his head hung the tiniest bit, almost dejectedly.  Absently, I wondered what he had to feel dejected about.  I was the one suffering here. Not him.

As he walked away, it seemed that he took with him whatever last little bit of love in the world stood between me and the darkness that the crowd harbored.  I could feel it closing in on me, sucking at my insides, draining me of something vital and light.  Or maybe it wasn’t draining.  Maybe it was more like I was absorbing their darkness and it was eclipsing the light.  Whatever the case, whatever the reason, I knew that my last chance at surviving the school, at surviving the town, had just turned and walked away from me without a backward glance.

When the voices of those surrounding me finally penetrated the thick cloud of misery Trace had left in his wake, it was their anger that I heard first.  And then I felt it.  As well as their powers.